Troubled Blood

“Yeah,” said the man hoarsely, revealing crooked brown teeth. “Miss Ellacott?”

“Robin,” she said, smiling as they shook hands.

“This is my granddaughter, Lauren,” said Tucker.

“Hiya,” said Lauren, glancing up from her phone, then back down again.

“I’ll just get myself a coffee,” said Robin. “Can I buy either of you anything?”

They declined. While Robin bought herself a flat white, she sensed the eyes of the old man on her. During their only previous conversation, which had been by phone, Brian Tucker had talked for a quarter of an hour, without pause, about the disappearance of his eldest daughter, Louise, in 1972, and his lifelong quest to prove that Dennis Creed had murdered her. Roy Phipps had called Tucker “half-insane.” While Robin wouldn’t have gone that far on the evidence to date, there was no doubt that he seemed utterly consumed by Creed, and with his quest for justice.

When Robin returned to the Tuckers’ table and sat down with her coffee, Lauren put her phone away. Her long neon extensions, the unicorn tattoo on her forearm, her blatantly false eyelashes and her chipped nail varnish all stood in contrast to the innocent, dimpled face just discernible beneath her aggressively applied contouring.

“I came to help Grandad,” she told Robin. “He doesn’t walk so well these days.”

“She’s a good girl,” said Tucker. “Very good girl.”

“Well, thanks very much for meeting me,” Robin told both of them. “I really appreciate it.”

Close to, Tucker’s swollen nose had a strawberry-like appearance, flecked as it was with blackheads.

“No, I appreciate it, Miss Ellacott,” he said in his low, hoarse voice. “I think they’re really going to let it happen this time, I do. And like I said on the phone, if they don’t, I’m ready to break into the television studio—”

“Well,” said Robin, “hopefully we won’t need to do anything that dras—”

“—and I’ve told them that, and it’s shaken them up. Well, that, and your contact nudging the Ministry of Justice,” he conceded, gazing at Robin through small, bloodshot eyes. “Mind you, I’m starting to think I should’ve threatened them with the press years ago. You don’t get anywhere with these people playing by the rules, they just fob you off with their bureaucracy and their so-called expert opinions.”

“I can only imagine how difficult it’s been for you,” said Robin, “but given that we might be in with a chance to interview him, we don’t want to do anything—”

“I’ll have justice for Louise if it kills me,” said Tucker. “Let them arrest me. It’ll just mean more publicity.”

“But we wouldn’t want—”

“She don’t want you to do nothing silly, Grandad,” said Lauren. “She don’t want you to mess things up.”

“No, I won’t, I won’t,” said Tucker. His eyes were small, flecked and almost colorless, set in pouches of purple. “But this might be our one and only chance, so it must be done in the right way and by the right interrogator.”

“Is he not coming?” said Lauren. “Cormoran Strike? Grandad said he might be coming.”

“No,” said Robin, and seeing the Tuckers’ faces fall, she added quickly, “He’s on another case just now, but anything you’d say to Cormoran, you can say to me, as his part—”

“It’s got to be him who interviews Creed,” Tucker said. “Not you.”

“I under—”

“No, love, you don’t,” said Tucker firmly. “This has been my whole life. I understand Creed better than any of the morons who’ve written books about him. I’ve studied him. He’s been cut off from any kind of attention for years, now. Your boss is a famous man. Creed’ll want to meet him. Creed’ll think he’s cleverer, of course he will. He’ll want to beat your boss, want to come out of it on top, but the temptation of seeing his name in the papers again? He’s always thrived on the publicity. I think he’ll be ready to talk, as long as your boss can make him believe it’s worth his while… he’s kosher, your boss, is he?”

Under almost any other circumstances, Robin would have said “he’s actually my partner,” but today, understanding what she was being asked, she said,

“Yes, he’s kosher.”

“Yeah, I thought he seemed it, I thought so,” said Brian Tucker. “When your contact got in touch, I went online, I looked it all up. Impressive, what he’s done. He doesn’t give interviews, does he?”

“No,” said Robin.

“I like that,” said Tucker, nodding. “In it for the right reasons. But the name’s known, now, and that’ll appeal to Creed, and so will the fact your boss has had contact with famous people. Creed likes all that. I’ve told the Ministry of Justice and I told your contact, I want this Strike to do it, I don’t want the police interviewing him. They’ve had their go and we all know how well that went. And no more bloody psychiatrists, thinking they’re so smart and they can’t even agree on whether the bastard’s sane or not.

“I know Creed. I understand Creed. I’ve made a lifelong study of his psychology. I was there every day in court, during the trial. They didn’t ask him about Lou in court, not by name, but he made eye contact with me plenty of times. He’ll have recognized me, he’ll have known who I was, because Lou was my spitting image.

“When they asked him in court about the jewelry—you know about the pendant, Lou’s pendant?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“She got it a couple of days before she disappeared. Showed it to her sister Liz, Lauren’s mother—didn’t she?” he asked Lauren, who nodded. “A butterfly on a chain, nothing expensive, and because it was mass-produced, the police said it could have been anyone’s. Liz remembered the pendant differently—that’s what threw the police off, she wasn’t sure at first that it was Lou’s—but she admitted she only saw it briefly. And when they mentioned the jewelry, Creed looked straight at me. He knew who I was. Lou was my spit image,” repeated Tucker. “You know his explanation for having a stash of jewelry under the floorboards?”

“Yes,” said Robin, “he said he’d bought it because he liked to cross-dress—”

“That he’d bought it,” said Tucker, talking over Robin, “to dress up in.”

“Mr. Tucker, you said on the phone—”

“Lou nicked it from that shop they all used to go to, what was it—”

“Biba,” said Lauren.

“Biba,” said Tucker. “Two days before she disappeared, she played truant and that evening she showed Lauren’s mum, Liz, what she’d stolen. She was a handful, Lou. Didn’t get on with my second wife. The girls’ mum died when Lou was ten. It affected Lou the worst, more than the other two. She never liked my second wife.”

He’d told Robin all of this on the phone, but still, she nodded sympathetically.

“My wife had a row with Lou the morning before she disappeared, and Lou bunked off school again. We didn’t realize until she didn’t come home that night. Rang round all her friends, none of them had seen her, so we called the cops. We found out later, one of her friends had lied. She’d smuggled Lou upstairs and not told her parents.

“Lou was spotted three times next day, still in her school uniform. Last known sighting was outside a launderette in Kentish Town. She asked some geezer for a light. We knew she’d started smoking. That was partly what she rowed with my wife about.

“Creed picked up Vera Kenny in Kentish Town, too,” said Tucker, hoarsely. “In 1970, right after he’d moved into the place by Paradise Park. Vera was the first woman he took back to that basement. He chained them up, you know, and kept them alive while he—”

“Grandad,” said Lauren plaintively, “don’t.”

“No,” Tucker muttered, dipping his head, “sorry, love.”

“Mr. Tucker,” said Robin, seizing her chance, “you said on the phone you had information about Margot Bamborough nobody else knows.”

“Yeah,” said Tucker, groping inside his windcheater for a wad of folded papers, which he unfolded with shaking hands. “This top one, I got through a warder at Wakefield, back in ’79. I used to hang round there every weekend in the late seventies, watch them all coming in and out. Found out where they liked to drink and everything.

“Anyway, this particular warder, I won’t say his name, but we got chummy. Creed was on a high-security wing, in a single cell, because all the other cons wanted to take a pop at him. One geezer nearly took out Creed’s eye in ’82, stole a spoon from the canteen and sharpened the handle to a point in his cell. Tried to stab Creed through the eyeball. Just missed, because Creed dodged. My mate told me he screamed like a little girl,” said Tucker, with relish.

“Anyway, I said to my mate, I said, anything you can find out, anything you can tell me. Things Creed’s saying, hints he gives, you know. I paid him for it. He could’ve lost his job if anyone had found out. And my mate got hold of this and smuggled it out to me. I’ve never been able to admit to having it, because both of us would be in trouble if it got out, but I called up Margot Bamborough’s husband, what was his name—”